Saturday, December 10, 2005

Smithing Canadian Values and The Chestertonian Prophecy

This business of pulling "deeply held Canadian values" direct from the thin air seeping out of politicians' butts has become too much. David Miller suggests in today's Post that the claim that "guns have no place on the streets of Toronto or anywhere else in this country" is, likewise, one such of these great glaring pieties that has been floating about in the collective Canadian consciousness all along ... From the dairy farmer in Saskatchewan to the miner-come-call-centre-coordinator in Cape Breton, this business about the guns is apparently tattooed (and has been since time immemorial) onto the very intangible matter of our souls. (Next to, one imagines, a comical rendering of a beaver wearing a beer helmet, deep in comfortable but ribald conversation with Buddy Cole ... against, of course, a backdrop of a Mac-sauce-and-blood-soaked Old Glory.)

So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribable mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves... Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return.

"The levelling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions."

- José Ortega Y Gasset

"Strange to think of you, strange now to hear your voices through the ether coming from a world so long since barred to us! I miss you, miss you even though you were opponents of mine and politically on the other side - oh, believe me, finally it is the lack of all opposition and any dissension whatsoever, and the deadly monotony that results that makes life here so unbearable."

- Friedrich Percyval Reck- Malleczewen

"It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person's response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume or shrillness of his lamentation."

- Theodore Dalrymple

"Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy."

- Roger Scruton

"A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides ... the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires."

- Edmund Burke

"The current muddle between subjectivism about morals and dogmatism about rights, for example, merely conceals the semantic changes by which the moral is being transposed into the manipulable, leading to a gullible acquiescence in the projects of governments."

- Kenneth Minogue

"In Toronto, it appears, one may leer desirously at underdressed girls, or gape at them with the costive expression of one who considers Nudity and Art to be synonymous terms, but one must not laugh."

- Samuel Marchbanks

"Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity."